For weeks I continually received prompt emails from Cpanel to upgrade to v2.3.1 so I clicked just 1 button to see what it was all about and it did an auto run so the decision was taken out of my hands for me.

An error message then appeared and now I get an Internal Server Error 500 - "The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request".

I'm at such a loss how to fix it. My host (Betterwebspace) have been great and tried to assist but they now recommend a fresh install and I'd lose everything. Albeit it looks like I've lost it all now anyway.

Can anyone please please help me? I'm not very technical minded but I will do my best to try any recommendations

First Don't panic and do anything foolish ........ 1.) Have you done a backup of your forum or website anytime recently ?2.) FTP or use cPanel to "view" your folder (directory) and check if the folders and files are still there, the Most important are the /Boards, /Members, /Messages and possibly the /Variables and /Attachments folders. If these folders above still contain the files .. your forum is recoverable.

Note: YaBB does not support, promote or actually has nothing to do with this cPanel Addon. It is developed by a third party for cPanel to sell and/or include with the cPanel installation.

Now since you still have the ./Boards, ./Members and ./Messages folders (and also have fairly new backup) Your site is recoverable ... If you have ANY problems Holler ! Do NOT overwrite any file in those folders, nor in the ./Variables folder from an Installation zip. Since your Quick install failed, you might consider upgrading YaBB to Y2.5. Only need to do a manual install.

Also, it looks as though I have 4 forums sitting on my directory, 3 of which include my original and the recent upgrades - should I delete any of these off? I have amended the permissions as suggested against just the yabb folder only.

The yabbOLD folder was from a previous upgrade but it seemed that my normal YaBB could not work without it. All so confusing!

If your not hurting for disk space .. I would NOT delete any folder until you have the New forum running and correct. If the Forum you were using, required the other folder .. then you Path Settings were (are) incorrect.Sim - WOLF wrote on Jul 29th, 2011 at 8:23pm:

but I'm struggling with what to do next (binary mode etc?).

If your manually installing the forum (as suggested) and your using an FTP to upload files .. do NOT use the Auto transfer mode, the file extentions in YaBB might not be understood and the incorrect transfer mode will corrupt file. It is strongly suggested ALL files under the yabb2 folder be transferred (uploaded) in AscII transfer mode.